Robert Horton, Writing About Film

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About This Site

The Crop Duster has two goals. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly; and public appearances and TV jobs. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN.

The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve.

Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972). Still filthy after all these years.

Fräulein Else (Paul Czinner, 1929). The quick, androgynous presence of Elisabeth Bergner makes this otherwise slow silent film a real source of fascination. She plays the daughter of a family on the verge of bankruptcy; asked to beg for a loan from a wealthy man, she suffers accordingly. Based on a Schnitzler story.

The Past (Asghar Farhadi, 2013). The director of A Separation returns with a story set in France, but the deliberate, achingly empathetic style of the previous film is still very much in place. He also knows how to make a final shot happen. (full review 2/7)

Gloria (Sebastián Lelio, 2013). Another one left off the Oscar foreign-language list. How does that happen? Along with its other well-observed details about the life of a single woman of a certain age, this movie brings a Chilean actress, Pauline Garcia, who arrives as a master you never knew existed. (full review 2/7)